Exercise And Eating

The Secret To Weight Loss: It All Comes Down To Diet

I once knew an Olympic rower who had to eat a pint of Haagen Dazs every day just to keep from wasting away. Mind you, she was training hard 30 hours a week and had reached her taste limit on healthy food to fuel her exercise performance.Conversely, I train hard about 10-12 hours each week (not questing-for-an-Olympic-medal hard, just MAMIL hard), and if I wasn’t careful about my diet, I’d start looking like a manatee with a gland problem in no time.Even with all the running, cycling, weightlifting, and other exercise I do, I know I don't have carte blanche to eat whatever I want. I can’t start plowing through a pile of Doritos like the apocalypse is imminent or mainlining KFC gravy while chugging pints of Guinness if I want to continue seeing those little lines on my abdomen that my wife likes so much.I’ve heard trainers, dieticians and obesity researchers alike say that weight loss is anywhere from 70-90% diet related. In reality, I’d say weight loss is 100% diet, because unless you’re training for the Olympics, you can eat more in a day than you can burn.On average, with all my exercise endeavors, I burn about 3,200 calories each day, and I know I can hit that with one trip to McDonalds. Hell, I can drink more than 3,200 calories in a day.So, I have to be careful with what I eat. If weight loss is your goal, then so must you.But you’re a guy. Who cares if you’re carrying around some extra weight in the midsection? Answer:Women care. They don’t like their men looking like they’re about to enter their third trimester. There’s also the fact that having abig belly is a high cardiac health risk factor and also increases the risk of you going batcrap senile.So, if you want to get laid more and/or not have your heart explode while you lose your mind, take my advice and work on losing that gut.Losing weight is all about eating fewer calories, so it really is all about diet.But here’s the thing: Diet, to a significant degree, is all about exercise.Moving your ass is the key factor in learning to control what you stuff in your piehole. The reason for this is simple: We live in an obesogenic environment. Society is practically designed these days to make us fat so that only the best informed and strongest willed can resist the ample supplies of high-calorie crap that permeates our food supply. You can’t just decide to eat healthier. You need a plan and a lot of mental discipline. These are things that develop by integrating regular and intense exercise into your life.I’ll explain more on how that works later. For now, let’s look at how we got into this mess and why the world is getting so damn fat.